Water party

This is what our local hyper-planet of largely un-needed stuff is proposing at the moment.
Fete d'l'eau - water party, Fete de actually being wordage used in French supermarkets to drag you in and spend money on special offers/seasonal goods/bulk buy, etc - not impromptue water fights and people dressed in scanty bathing attire.
Fete de vin in the autumn I can sort of relate to - time of the grape harvest, local wine companies making space for their new influx, a certain celebration of the wealth of different wine types, etc. Even though we might only buy a couple of bottles it's quite interesting to look at the wooden boxes stamped with the producers' names, and gawp at how people could possibly imagine spending three hundred euros on one bottle . . .
The pig (fete du cochon) fete is vile: lines of cooler cabinets filled with everything from brains to trotters, where fleets of customers pick through the mountains of cling-wrapped/poly-trayed pink  items before loading up their trollies, without the slightest thought, I imagine, as to where it has all come from . . .
There are many other fetes de whatever, but a water fete is the first I have seen, following on closely from the Jesus-emerging fete - marked in acres of chocolate rabbits and chocolate anything else remotely Easterish.
A fete celebrating ideas for conserving water might have been nice - water filters, household devices for reusing water, a small talk illustrating where our local water comes from, tap water tasting. . . Nope. This was just an excuse to push as much water in plastic bottles encased in plastic packaging as possible. And the REALLY stupid thing is, we have a major mineral water source just down the road a few km away which used to sell bottled water in the local supermarkets until the corrupt local council managed to close it down. Happily, for us, you can still go there and fill your own bottles which is great.
SO. And I know I've gone on about this before . . . but, what about, the local, or nearest other source - not somewhere in Italy or Scotland, could provide a couple of huge water dispensers in the supermarkets where you could take your bottles back and refill them for say, 10 cents a go?
Possibly not as simple as I imagine, but better than container lorries of plastic water bottles being driven from hundreds and thousands of kms away just so we can have a choice - if we even need one anyway, most people, at least in this planet-sector, being blessed with sanitary drinking water.
Mark read me some extraordinary info from the Guardian this morning re the amount of plastic water bottles used in one year.

Imagine laying out half-litre bottles on the pitch at Wembley Stadium. You could fit 1.7m bottles on the grass, packed into a tight grid. Now imagine building up layers of bottles, covering the same area, to build a tower. To contain all the bottled water we buy each year, you would end up with a 514-metre skyscraper – 200 metres taller than the Shard.

Not something to be celebrated.

Leclerc's own emulation of the afore-mentioned plastic-bottle sky-skyscraper?




A slightly different fete d'l'eau in Cambodia.

Climate change, zombie cereal ads and selfi-spoons

After reading a particularly worrying article on melting glaciers in the Guardian this morning I somehow ended up wandering into another piece about food products designed to allow you to carry on instagramming while eating snack foods . . . Yes. In Japan, much thought has been put into creating pre-smashed crisps that you can 'drink' and thus not have to coat your phone in grease.
Mc Donalds has also created special plastic chip-spears to elevate this stress, and praise the Lord, someone has invented the Selfi-spoon . . . Mm-hm, you can eat and snap at the same time.
A hole the size of Manhattan has been discovered in an Antarctic glacier, but don't worry your phone will no longer have to be greasy. Phew.
Highlighted within this article was a link to this scary ad for? I can't even remember which cereal brand as I was so petrified. Says everything about where we are really. Crap food (?) promoted with the most annoying song ever, dumbed-down, pastel tones, glazed/zombie expressions, and a selfi-spoon. Who are all these people and why do they suddenly invade this house owned by a milk-slurping ménage à trois?


selfi-spoon in many colour ways.

Meat and two veg

Or two veg and one meat, or six veg and no meat, and preferably as un-messed-about-with as possible.
I was fascinated to read Jay Rayner's review of 'Le Cinq' in Paris, a gastro-palace the likes of I am very unlikely to step inside even if I did win the pools which again is highly unlikely as I never do them.
If I did win them, or went out to celebrate the publication of my latest book and its handsome advance ;o) I would probably choose a good Indian restaurant or perhaps somewhere very beautiful with a menu of say forty pounds a head, or perhaps just the small fish restaurant I went to with my son the other day where we sat on a covered terrace looking over the sea and ate lovely fish that still looked like fish.
When did all this farting about with food really start? In the 70s? Nouvelle cuisine, I suppose, but then I just looked that up and Wiki told me that N. Cuisine was actually a movement away from over-faffed food - simpler, fresher, less rich ingredients, etc. So the stuff in eateries such as Le Cinq must be a combination of the two: old classic/ haute cuisine and nouvelle - rich sauces, marinades, gold -leaf, aspic droplets, stuff hanging off bits of other stuff and/or balanced precariously/sizzling, on fire, dry-iced and so on.
When I worked in a 'French restaurant' in Farnham in the early 80s, there was a lot of piddling about with food: placing small bits of meat on top of a carefully sculpted potato with a crescent of sauce, etc, but it still was generally food that you could recognise unlike some of the oddities in Mr Rayner's photos and other over-elaborate messes I've seen while trawling Google for Michelin signature dishes.
Then there's the cost . . . Which would you rather eat?
This fresh fish salad with goat's cheese which cost fifteen euros at the afore-mentioned sea-side restaurant.

                                               


Or this depressing lamb thing at a price of ninety-five euros

                

                      Jay Rayner iPhone photo

Okay, their overheads will be a little different - small town in Southern France compared to a spot on Le Champs Elysees but there must be a happy medium . . .

My favourite part of Mr Rayner's review - the bit about the chocolate pud:

A dessert of frozen chocolate mousse cigars wrapped in tuile is fine, if you overlook the elastic flap of milk skin draped over it, like something that fell off a burns victim.

                                Yum

And it's true. My son turns grey at the sight of milk skin, and I don't think most people find it that appetising, so why drape it (or leave it in a rumpled heap) on some dessert that was probably going to set the diner back sixty odd quid? The subtle use of an edible flower or a nice honest blob of clotted cream instead? But then what do I know? I get excited about a buttered and Marmited crumpet or home-made coleslaw. You eat to live, not live to eat . . .

Love this line I happened to read this morning in Will Self's Psychogeography Too tome:
'Food is just shit waiting to happen'.

Keeping a light on in the soul

A beautifully enigmatic house that I might not have seen near Narbonne station if my son hadn't suggested going for a walk rather than shivering and lusting after chocolate in the vending machine while having to wait an hour for the connecting train

A very good friend of mine sent a post of her brother's blog to me yesterday, part of which was discussing the fact that in the 'olden days' - i.e before internet and even as far back as no phones, possibly even newspapers, people didn't really know much about anything beyond a few muddy fields/patch of desert/icy tundra, depending on where they happened to be on the planet and would go about their business, occasionally hearing something about the next village, or town, possibly city, possibly across seas - maybe once a year for somewhere so distant . . .
We now carry this weight of information about with us all the time, plus all our small domestic worries and fears, and perhaps it's really not too healthy. Anyway, if it is or it isn't this post is about taking a few minutes for the soul each day - leaving a constant homely light on, getting outside even if it's a total damp fog-out, to look at other things that we share this globe with: trees, birds, dogs, weeds - even a weed covered with morning drops of dew can be a startlingly beautiful thing in contrast to a picture of a ranting politician.

                            

                            Go outside and look at clouds - a wonderful and cost-free activity


Today, I did feel overloaded: one of those days where everything builds up into a vast mound of impossible-to-scale stuff.
I drove to collect water from our local source without remembering the drive there, and filled bottles while worrying about my ageing mother, my ageing God-mother, our ageing car, my, about to go to uni, son, where will he live? The hillside behind our house full of trees that all need cutting, the storyline I'm working on; why is it taking so long for the people who have my last book to decide what to do with it, the roofs that need clearing of moss, my aching legs, the computer that keeps announcing 'your start-up disc is full' the chimney that needs cleaning, the dogs that need expensive tic-preventative treatments, my husband who works too hard; whether we should update our wills, etc, etc . . . plus all the stuff I happened to have glanced at in The Guardian, and that tear-inducing film about ill-treated animals someone had loaded up on Facebook.
Two things stopped this mania: one: talking to another friend - who has an incredibly small amount of time to spare in her life - about artist activities, and the other, going for a walk in the rain with the dogs. I got wet feet and a wet head but felt revitalised on returning to the house. The trees on the slope suddenly seemed quite all right - I'll get round to cutting them in due course, the boy will be fine, mother will age more and she'll be fine in her warm, caring, care home, and everything else is really okay compared to most of the screaming headlines that I saw this morning, and perhaps might not look at tomorrow.

Things of absolutely no consequence

But with a certain weird satisfaction.
Anyone who has followed this blog may have come across various posts on the subject of our kettle.
Bought in a vide-grenier (car-boot sale) about ten years ago it has continuously been a functional and heart-warming object in our kitchen.
The original knob dropped off soon after we acquired it and then followed a procession of different objects to act as replacements: a brass curtain finial, a lead policeman, a metal greyhound, corks and so on. The latest, an ancient lead sheep, has been tied on about four times with the wire from a Blanquette (champagne-like substance from this region) cork, but the cork eventually perishes, or the wire snaps.
Mark is still insisting that the sheep is good and that the wire has to be recycled from the cork chosen for the job, rather than using a longer piece from a roll of wire. I told you this post was of little or no consequence . . . but I felt like writing about something small, cosy and homely when such unknown and unbelievable enormities are currently filling our Guardian screen startup page.

                                

                                               tools for the job



                                    satisfied craftsman

                                

                                             Sheep reigns again

Further, further, further, further proof

That the world is a mad and dangerous place.

A friend just alerted us to this new gadget as sold on Amazon (who perhaps should know better - err, maybe not).

Rhik Samadder and the emerging egg substance

The Eggmaster.
A pink plastic device looking worryingly like something from a seedy adult online store (never looked at one I must hasten to add) with grippy black rubber sides and a flashing light . . . hmm.
According to Rhik Samadder's review in the Guardian you have to spray a non stick agent into the container first - sounds most appetising - crack two eggs into the already hot tunnel, wait awhile until a smelly tubular sponge appears, waving about like Alien from John Hurt's chest.
What's wrong with two eggs-cup-fork-pan = fried egg, or egg on toast, scrambled egg, poached egg, egg on camping gas stove, boiled egg, hard-boiled egg . . . time consuming? messy? no more than trying to figure out how to clean the new piece of landfill you might have eagerly unwrapped from Uncle Amazon.